Netflix officially comes out against the Comcast-TWC merger

In addition to news on possible price increases, Netflix on Monday also officially took a stance against the proposed $45 billion merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable. In its letter to shareholders released Monday, Netflix said that a combined Comcast and TWC would “possess even more anticompetitive leverage to charge arbitrary interconnection tolls for access to their customers.” To back up its reasoning, Netflix said that the decline of DSL has made cable Internet the default broadband technology for most Americans and claimed that if the merger were approved then many American households would have “Comcast as the only option for truly high-speed broadband” that offers service of 10Mbps or higher.

Netflix’s decision to come out against the merger is a big win for Senator Al Franken (D, Minn.), who last week urged the company to publicly oppose the merger and join his efforts to defeat it. As part of his appeal, Franken noted Netflix’s recent protest at having to pay regular fees to Comcast as part of a peering agreement aimed at making sure that its video streams maintained a consistently high quality, which was also something that Netflix noted in its own letter to its shareholders. It’s not known at this time whether Netflix will take a more active role in opposing the merger or whether it will simply state its public disapproval without joining a broader campaign.